Garbage In, Garbage Out

There are plenty of companies that will sell you parts, but I'd be surprised if there are any that provide the kind of after the sale support that Arizona TPI does.  The main reason that we can provide the in-depth tech advice that we do is that we have our own shop and we install pretty much everything we sell.  So, when you purchase from us, if you have questions about your installation, you can speak with someone who has done the same installation themselves.  We do enough work in our shop that we've probably already run into any problem that you might encounter!

Solving customer problems gives us a sense of satisfaction but, at the same time, it's frustrating when we can't find the solution.  One thing that makes our job difficult is when we don't get accurate information from the customer about the problem he's experiencing.  In the information technology field, there's a saying "garbage in, garbage out".  What this means is that, if you're writing a program to analyze some data and the data you're analyzing is, well, garbage, the output from your program can only be garbage as well.  In other words, the quality of the output will only be as good as the quality of the input.

The same holds true when we try to help a customer with a problem.  If we get good quality information about the problem we can usually solve it pretty quickly but when the information is inaccurate, it's a whole different story.  A typical scenario would involve a customer who purchased a wiring harness from us and had us reprogram their engine computer because they're transplanting an engine into another vehicle.  He'll install the engine in the vehicle, hook up fuel lines and fuel pump, install the wiring harness and engine computer and, when the installation is complete, he'll turn the key and the engine will crank but it won't start.  Of course, the obvious assumption at this point is that the engine computer was programmed improperly.  What else could it be?  So the customer will call us for help.

Often the first question asked will be whether there's something we might have done to the engine computer that would make the vehicle not start.  Now I won't try to say that we never make a mistake because occassionally we do, but our guy who programs the engine computers is really good at it and he typically programs at least one or two a day and often quite a few more than that so he gets a lot of practice.  He knows what he's doing.  So our answer is that it's entirely possible that there could be an error with the computer programming but that we'd like to start with the basics first.

We'll ask whether the customer has checked fuel pressure and, if so, was it correct.  We're told that it is, so we can now deduce that the fuel pump and pressure regulator are working fine and there's gas in the car (you'd be surprised how often that turns out to be the problem!).  If there's good fuel pressure, all of that has to be true!  But sometimes, we're told that the fuel pressure is good but, in fact, the fuel pressure was never checked.  So, of course, we'll never come to the conclusion that the reason the engine won't start is that the fuel pump isn't pumping or the car is out of gas.  If the fuel pump or an empty gas tank really are the culprit, we'll never solve this problem because of the bad information we were given.  Garbage in, garbage out.

Interestingly, we can often tell when we're getting bad information.  It's pretty obvious when a customer tells us that the fuel pressure is good and then, later in the conversation, asks what the fuel pressure should be.  At that point we know it's going to be very difficult to help this customer because we're not getting good information to work with.

So the moral of the story here is: if you have a problem with something you've purchased from us and need to call us for assistance we're happy to help but please try to answer our questions as accurately as possible.  And remember, it's OK to say "I don't know" or "I haven't checked that".  We'll just ask that you do check whatever it is and, we can explain how to do the checking if you're not sure about that also  We'd much rather hear that you haven't checked something than to be told that something was checked when it wasn't.  The better the  information you give us, the better we can help you!  Good information in, good information out!